Back in January I mentioned that one of my goals for this year is to improve my memory. It’s my overarching focus for this year. I wanted to update you on how it’s going. I started by reading the book Moonwalking with Einstein. It’s a fascinating account of how the author, Joshua Foer, went from having just an average memory to winning the US memory championship a year later. The author says the difficulty we have in recalling things that we want to remember, such as people’s names, addresses, and other information, is because that information is a poor fit to the information our brains latch on to naturally: visual information. Our brains have an evolutionary ability to remember pictures and images. If you close your eyes right now, you can likely trace a path from your driveway to your front door through the rooms in your home and the contents of each room. But a list of five things you were asked to pick up at the grocery store? That’s a lot harder to recall. The basic idea of memory techniques is to convert harder to remember information into visual images. The book focuses on specific techniques for doing that, so if you’re interested I highly recommend the book.

This week I got to put into practice some of the things I’ve learned. I had an All Team meeting on Thursday where I met about 50 people I hadn’t met before. I created a cheat sheet of their names and faces and university affiliations as well as their research focus. I studied this document for a couple of hours over the course of several weeks before the meeting while I walked on my treadmill. Really focused on committing their faces and names to memory. That’s another take home of the book: memory is rooted in paying attention. It takes focus and concentration. It’s not a quick task. When it came time for introductions at the meeting, I knew about 90% of the attendees. One woman who was photographed sitting next to a tree with medium length brown hair threw me because she didn’t bring the tree and she put her hair up in a ponytail. But overall, the prep time and techniques made a big difference. And I am now a big believer that visual information is indeed stickier for the brain to remember.

Surprisingly, the main benefit I got from reading a book wasn’t learning the memory techniques, although they are certainly helpful and give me a direction to pursue in the future. No, the most useful insight was also the author’s biggest benefit from his year long memory expedition: that we human beings are capable of learning almost any new skill if we practice and apply ourselves. He was really struggling the few weeks before the memory championship and turned to his mentor for guidance and suggestions. His mentor asked him if he was really working on the things that were hard for him to do or was he simply practicing and putting in the time he thought was required? Joshua admitted he was avoiding doing practice exercises he found difficult and taxing, preferring to spend his time doing the things he already knew how to do very well. He calls this the “OK Plateau”— when we’ve mastered a skill to an acceptable level but aren’t progressing beyond that. There’s really only one remedy for the OK Plateau: buckling down and directing our time and practice to our weak spots. James Clear calls this deliberate practice.

Oh, do I know about the OK Plateau! As some of you know, I started practicing the guitar several years ago and I’ve made real progress. Mostly, I enjoy it immensely. Granted, not every hobby has to be optimized, but I am trying to be a better guitarist. If I’m honest, I definitely avoid playing a few basic chords that are hard for me to play. And that’s been fine as I can almost always find a workaround. But this OK Plateau got me thinking. What would happen if I stopped avoiding these tedious chords and actually started working through them? I started with one chord about a month ago, the D chord ("D" is for dread), and every day I’ve been working on it, focusing on songs in the key of D. Guess what? My chording is much improved and a whole slew of songs that were previously unplayable are now on the table. Hey, Jude....I can play you now! So. Much. Joy! Yes, what we focus on gets improved. Even though on some level I knew that already, Moonwalking with Einstein drove the point home and made it unforgettable to me.